…but spend big on diversity. Must be part of that “Republican war on science.”
This doesn’t just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.
But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.
Students aren’t required to study American history or Western civilization. But they’re subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. “Far too many” have not learned to write effectively to read “a reasonably complex book.”
“In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do,” the report concludes. “Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less.”
That’s the sort of thing that happens when you pump money into an insular system and don’t hold its leaders accountable for results.
And man, that’s an unflattering picture of Sherry Lansing. She looks like she’s auditioning for the Walking Dead.
Is our student linking to the correct article?
He is now.
Yep it works, and what a way to get us to click the link. Not sure about Walking Dead as I don’t think they purse their lips.
Leland,
it’s hard to make a face like that, when your face is dripping off. But I get what Rand was getting at. You’d think someone in California would get outside more often.
Nothing new. Back in the late 70s, early eighties when I was an undergrad, there were no American History or literature courses required.
I’ll tell you about the University skimping on science. The University is now engaged in book burning.
There is a paper titled “Kinematics of Major Robot Linkages” that appeared in the 13th International Symposium on Industrial Robots/Robots 7 Conference Proceedings, written in 1983 by V. Milenkovic and B. Huang of the Ford Motor Company. That paper gave a comprehensive enumeration of the geometric configurations of robot linkages that allow a simple closed-form solution for the motor angles controlling the robot. It is also a “citation classic” in the number of other papers giving references to it.
The publisher “page proofs” on a new paper were just returned to the author this last Friday after having been in review for nearly 2 years. That new paper figures out a way to quickly and accurately calculate the motor angles of a type of robot that does not meet the critereon of Milenkovic and Huang (1983), where that type of robot has a wider reach than a robot meeting the criterion.
The page proofs came back with an “Author’s Query”, asking the author to check that the bibliography gives the correct page numbers to Milenkovic and Huang (1983). When the author went to check with the University library where he had first read Milenkovic and Huang (1983), the 13th ISIR/Robots 7 Conference Proceedings was, poof, gone from the collection.
Why is that book missing? Because the Right Wing is agitating about “The Education Bubble” and how too much aid money or too much student loan credit is going into colleges and universities, so the College of Engineering at the University, initiated by the very highest levels of administration, has embarked on some kind of scheme that the core courses will be taught by self-directed computer-graded learning. That scheme has converted an entire floor for the Engineering Library over to that activity, which has required pitching out about half the books in the collection.
So between the peer review process moving slowly and the Engineering Library throwing out half its books on account of some cost saving measure to head off the Right Wing critics who seem to think that the entire higher education enterprise is a boondoggle, between the time a paper was submitted and the time the page proofs were returned, one of the key citations in the bibliography went down the George Orwell memory hole.
In case you are wondering, Veljko Milenkovic was a part Serbian-ethnic refugee from the WW-II Croatian state and then the post-WW-II Communist Yugoslav state who was admitted to the United States, who with Carl Zaander at AMF developed the pioneering industrial robot, the AMF Versatran. He was also my dad.
My conservative leanings were strongly influence by Dad seeking refuge from first the Nazis and then soon after the Communists. My love of science and engineering was also influenced by Dad as a roll model. Another book thrown out by the library is Denavit and Hartenberg Kinematic Synthesis off Linkages, with Jacques Denavit and Richard Hartenberg being the originator of the use of 4X4 matrices to represent translation and orientation in robots and other mechanical linkages. Professors Denavit and Hartenberg were also colleagues of Dad when he had an Adjunct faculty appointment at Northwestern.
It seems that everyone is running around in the words of Governor Hunstman with their hair on fire, and I don’t know who I support politically anymore. On the other hand, I think I have always identified as being a Conservative and not a Libertarian. The quote “I could see so far because I stood on the shoulders of Giants” is from Newton with respect to his seminal contribution “Principia” marking the start of the modern age in physics and engineering physics, although Newton himself became one of the Giants.
This idea that we can do away with the University, with its forms, traditions, and protocols of learning and scholarly inquiry, perhaps to save money, perhaps to lock down the heels of all those Socialists dwelling within those hallowed halls, might be a Libertarian conceit, but it is certainly not Conservative in its temperment. The scholarly enterprise indeed stands on the shoulders of Giants, that is, if we don’t burn all of the books and wreck the institutions that have gotten us this far.
OK, role model. Dad was also a “roll model” because the treatment of rotations is a key element of the science of robotics.
I would imagine that part of the push against engineering comes from bean counters who can’t help but notice that an English literature or gender studies program has vastly lower resource requirements than an engineering department, and that’s just not fair! Perhaps its the result of decisions made long ago, that college tuition should be the same for all students regardless of degree field, as if all pursuits had equal training expenses. I’m pretty sure the for-profit institutes would point out that training a puppeteer is many orders of magnitude cheaper than training an airline pilot.
The local university here has finally moved computer science into the engineering department, which could be questioned on several grounds. There are aspects of programming that could greatly benefit from engineering discipline and rigorous math and logic, but much of programming is just out there in its own little world, subject only to the limits of creativity. It’s such a diverse endeavor that I think it will defy administrator’s attempts to categorize it in a little box and put a stamp on it.
Regarding Newton’s famous quote, it is said to be one of the sharpests insults in all of science. He bitterly despised Robert Hooke, who was trying to claim credit for the inverse square law for gravity, and Newton used the phrase in a letter to him. Hooke was a hunchback dwarf, or something close.
An aside. I had heard the same thing about Newton and Hooke in school, but Inwood argues rather convincingly that the quote, used in a rather cordial letter from Newton to Hooke, was not meant as an insult. It was a fairly conventional platitude, used by the poet Lucan, the philosopher Bernard of Chartres and Robert Burton well before Newtons letter in February 1676.
Who are these “right wing critics” who think colleges spend to much on STEM education? What I see from “right wing critics” is criticism of majors that ends in “studies”, not ones that end in “engineering”. In other words, criticism of degree programs that charge people a lot while not teaching them any type of marketable skill.
Pushing this as a “Right Wing” push to remove books seems wildly weird.
At RPI – an engineering school, they repeatedly have fights over library space – and engineering loses every single time.
I’ve personally had ‘antique’ but crucial references disappear on me. And, at the time, it was flat out stated “We need to be more diverse, and none of these idiots from the 1800s knew -anything- about -insert-random-non-engineering-course-here-.”
So, Arrhenius replaced by “My Life as a Part-Time Indian.” (Same shelf, that’s what was in the spot at the end of the second shelf.)
Disguising it as “This is what our white-rich-asshole-donors-want” seems about par for the intellectual powerhouses that end up in administration.
Some of that could be push back from the university administrators and a reflection of their cloistered worldview. To them, I’m sure the departments should be balanced, with similar floorspace and budgets in perpetuity. In truth, ourses like English, economics, accounting, sociology, psychology, mathematics, and history shouldn’t require much more space or equipment per student than they had a hundred years ago, just seats, books and a professor. In contrast, the resources and requirements for engineering (especially electrical), physics, biology (especially molecular), and computer science should have exploded.
Over the past century a good engineering department should’ve accumulated machine shops, automotive research buildings, wind tunnels, rocket test facilities, robot labs, vast semiconductor facilities, buildings full of electronic test equipment, optical shops, materials labs, and other things that would boggle the mind. Biology would have buildings full of DNA equipment, protein synthesizers, electron microscopes, etc. Physics would have nuclear reactors, high energy lasers, supercomputers, and experiments that defy explaination to a non-physicist.
A rational campus would be a core of old ivy-covered brick buildings covering thinking (language, philosophy, sociology, mathematics) surrounded by a huge and highly expensive modern sprawl devoted to doing, a reflection of our technological age. But this would mean that the uncouth mechanics with the lasers and robots would get a hundred times the funding of political science, philosophy, and sociology, and all the new campus construction would go to the tech geeks who don’t know Gloria Steinem from Socrates. An administration staffed with _____ studies graduates, under pressure to reduce the spiralling costs of education, will make sure the cuts fall on the departments they don’t like.
Title IX.
So between the peer review process moving slowly and the Engineering Library throwing out half its books on account of some cost saving measure to head off the Right Wing critics who seem to think that the entire higher education enterprise is a boondoggle, between the time a paper was submitted and the time the page proofs were returned, one of the key citations in the bibliography went down the George Orwell memory hole.
So why is the campus administration working so hard to confirm this stereotype of incompetence?
Fitting to this post that over at Drudge there is an lined to article about demonstration that got out of hand at Santa Monica College. As many as 30 people were pepper sprayed by campus police after the riot tried to storm into the meeting. All the while they were chanting, “No cuts, no fees, education should be free.”
Yea, gimme my free stuff. I want a free house, free car, free smartphone, free ipad, free socks, free haircuts, free condoms, free gin, free saccharine; free free free. Someone should ask them, “So, you want a free education? Have you ever heard the expression ‘You get what you pay for….'”.
I suspect their education at Santa Monica College is indeed poor and not worth a pay increase. Surely students capable of college coursework would know the way to protest fee increases is to quit paying them and go to another school. Nobody is forcing them to go to that College, but if taxpayers are required to fully subsidize education, as the protests want; then yeah, we will want a say in where students are allowed to go. That’s just the way of Communism.
They would know that if they had clue one about economics 101 in the real world. I suspect the protestors got stuck with commie indoctrination instead.
Egads, I totally mangled the first paragraph of my top post. I was probably to busy dreaming about fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows to bother with proofreading.
But great point Peterh, I totally agree. It’s funny because colleges will say they don’t teach with a slant. But then they boast about how people with a college degrees are more liberal. Uh, gee how did that happen? Oh wait, like you think I can’t see what’s really going on — right right.
It’s like, they indoctrinate them to rebellious ideologies, wonder why the students are all of sudden protesting and trying to force their way into meetings; and then having to pepper spray them down when they get out of hand. Yep, sounds like your average commie country to me.
The sad thing is that education is free but you have to have determination, focus, and self accountability to get an education this way.
That’s what I prescribe to is the school of hard knocks. Everything, every single thing I know about computers I taught myself.
I remember when people without a computer science degree were making much more than those with. Not sure what the situation is today. I’m obsolete.
I wonder how long it will take for the popular opinion of scientific exploration to become as state-centric as geographic exploration. Have schools already begun teaching that The Royal Society was the state-funded institution that discovered electricity? Will they cast Ben Franklin as a rare example of an amateur to be considered the exception to the state-sponsored norm?
The Space Studies Institute, ssi.org, has the nucleus of a great science and engineering library and wants to expand its research collection.
If you wish to donate a valuable technical work, or know of a university library that’s downsizing by eliminating classics, the books can be sent to
Space Studies Institute
1434 Flightline
Mojave, CA 93501
Donations are tax deductible. You will receive a receipt from SSI for your contribution.